Algren at Sea

  “Now, they got Historians at Some People’s Gas that can’t smell bananas from noodle-soup, but they know every inch of pipe ever laid down in Seattle, and they gave the report to one of these Gasified Historians. He looked at his histories, he studied all the maps, and the report came back: No gas main ever laid in that area. ‘That wasn’t southern fried chicken I smelled,’ I told them in the office.

  “The next Sunday morning the apartment building next to the station blew up, with a wedding party going on on the third floor. The bride was blown to bits, the bridegroom was maimed for life, the best man had a leg blown off and one of the bridesmaids got her spine snapped in two.

  “I owe it all to that army doctor who done such a good job operating on me. I give him full credit.”

  “You must have gotten a pretty good raise,” I suggested.

  Smith began to revolve his head gently, trying to decide whether I was serious.

  “Not exactly,” he told me, “I got fired the next week for intermeddling with Department of Gas Historians.”

  JULY 6TH

  SOUTH CHINA SEA, TWO DAYS FROM THE PORT OF HONGKONG. DINGDING, HINKLETINKLE, THE FINKIFIED LASAGNA AND THE MAN TOO TIMID TO DAMN.

  I once went to New York for the skating at Rockefeller Plaza and was sharpening my skates when the telephone rang. A woman’s voice, sounding like a cross between a crow’s and a barbed-wire fence, informed me, “Alfred Bovine would like you for dinner.”

  “I don’t blame him,” I assured this charmer, and hung up. The phone rang right back.

  “Don’t you like lasagna?” the same voice inquired.

  Realizing that Bovine had altered his plan of attack, I went down to the lobby with my skates under my arm.

  They were waiting for me. I didn’t place him right off, but he had the air of a pool-hustler who works days in an embalming parlor. He liked me too.

  All the way to the restaurant they took turns recommending the lasagna.

  “I’m a meat-eating mouse,” I had to let them know.

  We entered one of those Italian joints where all the waiters look like they want another crack at Ethiopia.

  “Three orders of lasagna,” Bovine decided.

  “I’ll eat anything that won’t eat me,” I corrected him, “but I draw the line at the cheese-and-flour route. Give me an oyster stew, filet mignon rare with several well-chosen champignons.”

  A lull like the grating of pebbles being dragged, against their common will, by an ebbing wave, ensued; yet the place was two miles from the sea.

  “What do you do?” I asked the blonde just to see if she did anything but recommend lasagna.

  “I work at Doubleday,” she told me, “but I don’t like it. Nobody laughs at Doubleday.”

  I could see how things might work out that way. “They laugh at Random,” I assured her.

  “I don’t see anything funny in that,” she assured me.

  “I didn’t think it was anything riotous myself,” I had to admit. “I just thought it was better than sitting around looking at one another. After all, I’m not Zero Mostel.”

  “I wish you were,” she told me.

  “I wish you were Dorothy Loudon myself,” I told her resignedly, “but there are people in hell who’d like ice-water too.”

  Bovine was chomping lasagna as though cheese were going out of style. If there was going to be any further conversation I’d have to make it. I’d finally placed him as a distributor of well-packaged precepts whom a friend of mine had once described as “too timid to damn and too stingy to applaud.” But all that had been before my time.

  “Have you seen any plays here?” he asked me. There was a dab of lasagna on his chin.

  “I saw one about a fellow in jail,” I recalled, “that reminded me of a fellow named Hinkle, who was once doing time in the machine shop at Jefferson City. He began eating bolts, nuts and washers with the notion that if he got enough metal inside himself he’d get sent to the dispensary. He got so much junk inside him that you could hear him tinkle when he walked, so the other cons called him Hinkletinkle. When they put him under the X-ray there was so much metal inside him they had to operate and the operation was a success.”

  “What is the point?” the lady inquired.

  “Why, the operation was a success because the warden said ‘We’re transferring Hinkletinkle to the mental ward—‘mental,’ not ‘metal,’ and I thought that was pretty good for a warden. Though I admit,” I added hurriedly, “it isn’t nearly as comical as the time when Judge J. Daniel Dingding tried a kid for getting out the hook-and-ladder on a false alarm.”

  “I’m doing a critique on Hemingway for Commentary,” Bovine let me know. “Where are the great writers?”

  “I read your papers on the Failure of Steinbeck, the Failure of Faulkner, the Failure of Fitzgerald, the Failure of Wolfe, and the Success of Irving Shulman,” I filled him in. “I can hardly wait to read this one.”

  “All the great ones are gone,” he mourned.

  Somebody had put an oyster stew in front of me.

  “There was this Chicago judge we called Dingding,” I continued, “because once, long before he was elected to the bench, he’d turned in a false fire-alarm and gotten the hook-and-ladder dashing about looking for something on fire; only there wasn’t anythng on fire. They couldn’t do anything much about it except put him on probation and keep him away from matches because he was under-age. Dingding promised never to pull another firebox, and was so true to his word they made him a judge; and he has kept his word to this very day. To this day, if Dingding says he’ll dismiss a case for five hundred dollars, he’ll dismiss it.”

  “Your stew is getting cold,” the lady told me.

  “Wait till I finish the story,” I promised her. “You’ll howl. Because even though His Honor doesn’t pull fireboxes any more, he still thinks like a man who’d like to own his very own hook-and-ladder—you ought to have heard him holler at this kid accused of setting fire to a school. ‘We have to keep Chicago strong and America mighty! Bury this terrorist! Hard labor! No parole! Take him away!’ But the kid jumped up and hollered as loud as Dingding, ‘Your Honor! This case has been fixed’—and his lawyer jumped up and knocked the kid down right there in court!

  “‘What did he say?’ Dingding asked the kid’s lawyer.

  “‘Your Honor, he said ‘I’m only a kid from the sticks,’ the lawyer answered as quick as that. Dingding looked at his bailiff and the bailiff gave Dingding a wink.

  “‘In view of the defendant’s extreme youth and it being a first offense we recommend mercy and suspend sentence until after lunch,’ Dingding announced, ‘go and sin no more.’”

  “There’s nothing funny in that either,” the lady felt.

  “But that isn’t the end of the story,” I explained to her, “because when the lawyer took this kid home and told his father what the kid had jumped up and said, the father knocked the kid down too.”

  “So?” she asked.

  “So that same evening the bailiff dropped by and talked to the boy more like a father than the boy’s own father.

  “‘I feel so bitter about being knocked down in public,’ the boy told the bailiff.

  “‘Well,’ the bailiff told him, ‘we’re in private now’—and knocked the kid down again! ”

  “Are you making this up as you go along?” she wanted to know.

  “Well, Dingding came in later, wanting to know what the bailiff thought he was trying to get away with fixing a case behind his back, and the bailiff said he’d been afraid to mention it because he was afraid Dingding would be furious at the idea of fixing a case. ‘I don’t blame you,’ Dingding acknowledged, ‘I like a good thief—but a man who’d pull a fire-alarm in cold passion’—and he swung around and hit that poor kid so hard the kid went out cold right there on his own parlor floor.”

  “What is the point?” the lady demanded to know.

  I looked at the last lonesome oyster in my stewless, drained and drying bow
l. And the oyster looked back up as baffled as myself.

  “The point is that, when it came his turn, Dingding hit the kid harder than anybody,” I explained.

  “What did you think of the play you saw?” Bovine asked.

  “It was by an Irishman who’d spent eight years in an English prison,” I recalled—“It was about Capital Punishment.”

  “O, this killing, killing, killing,” Bovine grieved, “O Castro! Enough violence! Enough killing!”

  “I just can’t see how anyone can object to capital punishment for traitors,” the lady sailed in.

  “They used to hang eleven-year-olds for sheepstealing,” I remembered reading, “but it didn’t put a stop to sheepstealing.”

  “I wasn’t talking about stealing,” she corrected me, “I was talking about treason.”

  “A person’s habits are pretty well formed by the time he’s old enough to be a spy,” I decided to go along with her, “now if they’d string up a couple of ten-year-olds for snitching as a preventive measure, it would put a short quick stop to selling atomic secrets later. And there’d be more sheep for the rest of us. As it is there’s hardly enough to go around.”

  Conversation somehow slowed down after that, being mostly about whether Theodore Dreiser was a Great Great Writer or just a pretty good old sport. I maintained that the pen is mightier than the sword.

  Then, having disposed of the filet, I took a toothpick and began trying to pry my gums loose.

  “Put that away! ” the lady commanded me.

  I’d thought that would get her.

  I went to work so furiously that a fragment of filet pirouetted off the toothpick and taxied in on Bovine’s spumoni. The lady was halfway to the door before, half into his coat, Bovine caught up with her. I had just time to grab my skates and catch up with them both as they went through the door, wedging the three of us tightly for one moment. Then the wedge broke, they fled into a waiting cab and wheeled off trailing a scent of finkified cheese.

  A light snow was falling. I stood alone but for my toothpick and skates. Somewhere down on Sixth Avenue a siren wailed.

  Making me wonder whether Dingding’s disappointment wasn’t the same as that of any critic, or critic’s mistress, for whom all triumphant hook-and-ladders fade.

  Until nothing is left along cold streets where nothing can ever catch fire again.

  I understood why the critic preferred dead writers to living ones.

  JULY 9TH

  CONCANNON GETS THE SHIP IN TROUBLE or ASSY-END UP ON HO-PHANG ROAD

  The blood on my shirt is not my own. It never worked for me. It was last employed by Manning. If he wants it back all he has to do is to wring out the shirt.

  Manning won’t be wringing anything out of anything until the swelling below his left eye subsides. Has anyone informed you that Communications Officers have very fast hands?

  Traveler! You too can be the only man aboard sporting a Kowloon Shiner! A fast bust in the face, delivered with all the elements of total surprise, can be yours without provocation. Southeast Asia has the action because everybody coagulates faster there. Even children coagulate. Anything goes in a free-trade port.

  Kowloon was the town for Japanese transistors and Ho-Phang Road was the street for lovely girls. We would find a bar leaping with merriment was THE PLAN: There Quong and I would wait while Concannon purchased transistors for one-third of what we would be able to sell them for in Bombay.

  Time was of the essence. The Malaysia Mail would stand off Hongkong for four hours, including the minutes that would be taken by the ship’s shore-launch. So Concannon asked the driver to put in at Kowloon when we boarded the launch. The motor was going when Manning climbed in. Nobody had sent for him: he just climbed in.

  “We’re not going to Hongkong,” Concannon told him. “We’re going to Kowloon.”

  Manning didn’t reply. He just sat at the end of the launch by himself. It looked as if he had it in mind to follow us around Kowloon to see whether we were buying Japanese transistors.

  Concannon was our leader. Transistors was our mission. Lovely girls would be our reward. But how was Quong, who sometimes took as long as half an hour to fall in love, going to find time to fall in love twice in Kowloon? If he didn’t it would be the first port in which he would fall in love only once. Concannon, of course, held the ship’s record by falling in love five times in two hours. But there was a fifteen-minute limit in that whorehouse.

  “You don’t have a wife in every port because you’re a seaman,” I reminded him, but he cut me short.

  “You’ve used that bit before,” he told me dryly.

  When we stepped onto the Public Pier, the heat hit us straight out of the airless vault of a Chinese slum—and straight down into that vault we went.

  Multitudes: multitudes: haulers of carts and bearers of water, bicyclists, pedicabs, taxis, drivers of jeeps, honking vendors of fish in a heat the hue of a yellow dream. Ho-Phang Road lay between tenement terraces festooned with clothes drying in the scorching air.

  Concannon milled ahead of us. Sparks never picked a boulevard to stroll when there was an alley to prowl. He wasn’t content simply to make his way somewhere—if he didn’t have to force his way he was unsatisfied. We had to hurry to keep the crown of his head, where the hair had thinned, in view. His object being to lose Manning, he dodged into a bar under a sign that said: The Lion of Kowloon.

  A wave of cold air rushed over me as soon as the door shut behind me. After the murderous heat of the street, this air-conditioning felt like a plunge into a pool for seals. When the dimness lifted I looked around.

  The whores of that cave were waxen horrors transfixed by times long gone. One Chinese hooker loomed so huge, flesh enfolding flesh, that her eyes began melting helplessly as her belly began to swell. Beside her sat one so gaunt that her shadow had bones. I felt the wind of a cold depravity.

  A Japanese girl on a bar-stool in a bright dirndl swung about darting her pink tongue-tip at me and then smilingly spread her legs. She wasn’t more than sixteen and her dress was high on her black-mesh thighs. The Lion of Kowloon growled low. We took seats either side of her.

  A Japanese seaman left a drink standing to come over, take the girl by her arm and lead her out. Protectiveness turns fast to love.

  His move left the cave looking more like a wax museum than ever.

  “This looks worse than Korea,” I accused Quong, “you told me things were going to get better.”

  “Wait,” Quong promised me.

  “Wait for what?”

  Quong, out of the memory of his seaborne years, began searching for some port where I would be happier.

  “Sitagong!”—he hit on it—“Ooo-ooo—When you get to Sitagong! Muts better gel, Sitagong.”

  “Really better in Chittagong, Quong?”

  “Betta? Ooo-ooo! Pretty gel come get you in Sitagong! Very pretty Sitagong gel take you home! Sit on lap! Fan you! Kiss-kiss! Ooo-ooo—How pretty Sitagong gel kiss-kiss!”

  “How much is this going to cost me, Quong?” I inquired calmly.

  “Cost you?” He looked at me incredulously. “Not cost you. Sitagong gel, she not like Pakistani man—American man for Sitagong gel!” He started swinging his right hand over his head as though he were pitching for a girl’s indoor softball club; and a girl took the bar-stool next to mine as if she wanted to play catcher. Quong whispered into my ear, “And give you bath! Put you in perfume-bubboo! She get in perfume-bubboo with you!”

  “Quong!” I tried to stop him by sternness. “You aren’t expecting me to believe that this girl is going to get into the bath with me?”

  “Sure!” he insisted. “Very pretty sixteen-year-old Sitagong gel, she get in, scrub back, you foat.”

  “I float?”

  “Sure, when she hit you on head, you foat. Assy-end up you foat.”

  I got to my feet. “Why should she hit me on the head for God’s sake?” “Wha’ for? For take you pants. For take you shoe. For take you
money. Hit one time real good you foat down River Tsangpo.” He threw back his head in a Chinese convulsion and almost fell off the bar-stool. “Assy-end up! Assy-end up in River Tsangpo!”

  The humor of the Oriental is apparently based upon the superstition that, no matter how preposterous a premise, mere repetition entails comedy. Although I could visualize a corpse floating down the River Tsangpo I failed to see that it was funny if it were mine. Assy-end up indeed! I turned to face the girl who’d joined us.

  “What the hell you laughing at?” I asked this fool.

  “My name Suzi,” was her stupid reply.

  “Where you from?” I asked her magnanimously.

  “Sumatra.”

  “Meet Suzi Sumatra,” I introduced her to Quong, “Frank’s sister.”

  Now, if any, was the moment for hilarity.

  Nobody laughed.

  “Buy Lady-Drink?” Suzi—she had eyes of taximeter brown—inquired.

  “She wants you to buy her a drink,” I assured Quong.

  “Lady-Drink,” Suzi insisted. And what do you know, the bartender already had it poured!

  I tasted it. Suzi drank it. Quong paid for it. It was my turn to buy.

  “Short-term?” Suzi asked, “long-term?”

  “This girl has fallen in love with you,” I assured Quong, and left the pair of them to make a closer inspection of the whores of Ho-Phang Road.

  One woman was so thin I paused to see whether she was a vertebrate. She thought I was flirting but all I was doing was trying to see whether she was held together by wire or string.

  Lashes by Maybelline, talc by PX—Even in the dark you know. She wore one earring of amber and one of jade. Those things have a way of working loose in bed. Then you try to match one of each as best you can. For a ghost she had attractive cheekbones.

  “Me Alina,” she told me so tenderly that I decided to buy her a drink if she could swallow. “Two beers,” I instructed the waiter.

  “Wee-skee,” my tender ghost corrected me.